Juanita and Jim Brosseau travelled about 4,000 kilometres…just to catch the 1:30 stagecoach.
Well, that and meet with 40 family members at a family reunion.
The siblings came to southwestern Ontario from British Columbia recently for the family reunion, and to see the stagecoach their father, Vanny, built more than six decades ago.
The stagecoach, bearing the moniker, “Overland Stage Coach Lines,” is a detailed replica of the people movers that bounced along roads and wagon trails in the Old West.
It’s in the possession of Pain Court-area residents Chris and Sally Jenkins, who were actually married in the coach many moons ago. They wound up purchasing the stagecoach at auction, refurbishing it, and now keep it in prime shape.
The common link in all this is the late Warren Walsted, who was a friend of Chris Jenkins’ father, Bill, and a good buddy to Vanny Brosseau.
“Father and Warren were best of friends,” Juanita Brosseau said, recalling how the stagecoach was built over about four years’ time at the family home in Emeryville back in the 1960s.
“He built it at the house. He was a carpenter who worked in Detroit,” she said.
“We always heard that Warren and his best friend built it together,” Chris Jenkins said, adding he never dreamed to meet the friend’s family so many years later. “What are the odds that we’d get to meet the children? They found it (online) and wanted to come see it.”
Helping make this meeting come to be was an article in The Chatham Voice, “Couple to show off stagecoach near IPM,” in September of 2018, in advance of Chatham-Kent hosting the International Plowing Match.
Juanita Brosseau said an Internet search of the Jenkins led her to the story. She reached out to the local residents and stagecoach owners, and the rest is more-recent history.
The Chris and Sally Jenkins’ TLC has kept the coach in tip-top shape, earning smiles galore from visiting members of the Brosseau clan.
For Jim Brosseau, it was a two-way trip down memory lane to see the stagecoach once more. He fondly recalled his time atop the it for photographs at the young age of six, but closely examined it during his visit to the Jenkins’ farm.
“It’s just remembering what Dad would do with wood,” he said. “It was cool stuff. I play with wood these days. When I do that, I think about Dad, and watching him. He taught me enough so I still have all my 10 fingers.”
Jim Brosseau said he had to eyeball the workmanship.
“The craftsmanship that goes into this. To reproduce something that looks hundreds of years old,” he said. “I was poking around and trying to figure out how he did the joints.”
Having played around the stagecoach as a child, it seemed to stay in Chris Jenkin’s life over the years. That includes his father setting it up so Chris and Sally could be married in it more than 40 years ago.
After Walsted passed away, the stagecoach went up for auction about 12 years ago. The Jenkins attended the event.
“When we went to the auction, I was taking pictures because I didn’t think I’d see it again,” Sally Jenkins said.
Except her husband had other ideas.
“One thing led to another and I started bidding on it,” he said.
Once in their hands, the Jenkins opted to sand down all the wood and build the varnish back up. It was no small task. Chris filled a 45-gallon drum with sanding blocks, wore down all his fingerprints in the process, and Sally then applied 10 coats of varnish.
In between, they’d feared they’d done more harm than good, as the trim paint and lettering was almost invisible after the sanding.
But the varnish brought everything back to life.
And that brought smiles to the faces of the Brosseau clan.
